RUSSIA'96: THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

This was clearly not what Boris Yeltsin expected. On May 3, a bright and unseasonably warm day, the President of Russia traveled about 160 miles northeast of Moscow to Yaroslavl, an industrial city known as part of the "golden ring" of ancient fortified towns that formed the historic heart of Russia. Before the 10-hour tour, Yeltsin's campaign handlers described Yaroslavl as "one of the nation's most stable" places, code for an area presumed sympathetic to Yeltsin. Yaroslavl was the first town outside the capital that he visited after the unsuccessful 1993 rebellion failed to dislodge him from the Kremlin. Back then, conditions in the city were improving after decades of shortages, but residents still remembered taking the four-hour "sausage train" to Moscow simply to purchase basic foodstuffs, and the old Soviet-era joke was retold regularly: "Do you have meat here?" a customer asks. "No," says the shopkeeper. "Here we don't have fish; it's at the other store that they don't have meat." Yeltsin was nevertheless the triumphant victor over revanchism, and in Yaroslavl that day he was hailed joyously.

Two and a half years later, with the shops well stocked and the streets clean, a fit and rested President assumed that a similar reception awaited him--and with it the chance to demonstrate his appeal beyond the reform-minded enclaves of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Instead Yeltsin was clobbered. From his first stop until his last, the cries went up--from an old woman wagging her finger in the President's face: "Yes, there's food in the stores, but who can afford it?"; from a young factory worker: "Where are our salaries?"; from a middle-aged electrician: "Our savings are worthless!" More quietly, a well-dressed man said, "All we ever get from you are promises, but nothing ever happens."

Complaints about crime, unemployment, corruption and the growing disparity between haves and have-nots rounded out the chorus of distress. By day's end Yeltsin appeared tired and beaten. He seemed to have been unaware of the passion of discontent outside Moscow, a city about as representative of Russia as New York is of America. Yeltsin himself is partly to blame for being so out of touch. Suffering from an apparently serious heart ailment, the man many Russians liken to a modern-day czar has for the past two years been a virtual Kremlin recluse. And his inner circle of aides, forever jockeying for position, seem to have concluded long ago that bearing bad news to their boss is the least career-enhancing service they can render. Given his insularity, the President's wide-eyed wonder at the pounding he took in Yaroslavl was not surprising. "The complaints here," a dejected Yeltsin told a local television interviewer, "they're everywhere. These weren't just single cases. The people complained en masse."